People Who Eat Darkness (19 page)

• Sighting of a girl resembling Lucie on 28 July at 18.00 at the Just Co store in Nagoya. She had a perm and was holding hands with a man who was about 177cm tall. They got into an old silver car on the fourth floor of a car park.

• A child with a message of encouragement.

• Unnamed caller expressed the opinion that Matakado island in Ehime prefecture is a suspicious place.

• Sighting of a girl resembling Lucie in a tent at Fujisawa beach. There were a lot of Mexicans in the area having a party.

The Japanese police were almost completely uncommunicative. A prime ministerial secretary replied on behalf of Tony Blair, declining Tim’s suggestion that MI6 agents be sent to Tokyo. But Mike Hills was reassuring, and Tim spoke to him every day. “That was one thing that was so persuasive about Mike,” he said. “He was always available. He had one of those telephones which you could use anywhere in the world, those super-roaming quad-band intergalactic gizmos which, back then, were quite a thing. He was always phoning with updates. I never had any problem getting hold of him.” Everything was in hand, Mike said; all that was necessary was patience. But it was hard to think about anything other than the small, conventional mobile phone that Adam carried in his pocket.

Tim and Adam passed the time in Roppongi, drinking in the Sports Cafe and dining at Bellini’s. It was there one evening that the contact telephone suddenly began to ring. Tim and Adam looked at one another. Adam fumbled to answer it. “I picked it up and said hello,” Adam remembered, “and there was a Japanese guy at the other end, starting to say something, and then, after a split second, the line disconnected. I said, ‘Hello? Hello?’ but he’d gone. Tim and I, our eyes lit up: this must be them, finally getting in contact. But the phone never rang again.”

*   *   *

After a few days without any word from the kidnappers, Tim was becoming impatient. Mike apologized. The meeting to hand over the second installment of money had not taken place as scheduled, he explained; the intermediaries for the people holding Lucie had simply not turned up. But the lines of communication were still open, and Mike offered to get hold of a recent photograph of Lucie and a lock of her hair, to prove beyond question that the story was true.

Then, after Tim had been back in Tokyo a week, Mike called again with bad news: Lucie was no longer in Japan. The details were precise. Alarmed by the intense interest in the case, her captors had decided that the safest thing was to get rid of her. They had found three men willing to buy her. The sale had been transacted at a place called Tenkai. Soon after, Lucie had been smuggled onto a container ship called the
Leo J
. She was with four other young Western women, who were destined to be put on the market as sex slaves. But Mike was not ready to give up. His people had been tracking Lucie’s progress—one of them had even managed to get onto the ship and would report on its progress and the well-being of its human cargo.

Tim put down the phone in a turmoil of irritation and confusion. Then he called a friend who contacted Lloyd’s Register and inquired about the existence of a merchant vessel called the
Leo J
. To Tim’s amazement, the ship really did exist.

MV
Leo J

Gross Register Tonnage: 12,004 tons

Flag: Antigua & Barbuda

Manager/Owner: Mare Schiffahrtsgesellschaft MBH & Co., Haren, Germany.

The
Leo J
had indeed left Osaka on August 10, then docked at the Japanese ports of Kobe, Moji, Tokuyama, and then Hong Kong. It was now on its way to Manila.

The following morning, there was a fax from Mike containing a page of black-and-white photographs. They were almost completely indistinct, but one appeared to picture the inside of a house, and another showed three smiling Asian men seated on a train with a briefcase. “This place is Tenkai,” Mike had written below the first. Below the second: “Bag with money. They are on their way to Tenkai.”

“My People are moveing there buts [
sic
] now it seems,” the attached page read. “They have paid for some answers and now they are following them up.”

On August 24, a British businessman, who insisted on remaining anonymous, contacted the
Japan Times
offering a reward of £100,000 for information leading to Lucie’s safe return.

A few days later, Mike’s source on the
Leo J
passed on more dismaying news: the five sex slaves, including Lucie, had been transferred to another vessel, the
Aramac
, which was now on its way to Australia. The rescue plan was hastily adapted—the new ship would be intercepted at the city of Darwin, and Mike would fly there himself to meet Adam. For this he would need another $10,000, to cover his own expenses and those of his “people.”

Tim transferred the money to Mike’s bank in the Netherlands.

Adam flew to Darwin and checked into the hotel where they had agreed to meet.

Mike never appeared.

At the port of Darwin, nobody could tell Adam anything about a ship called the
Aramac
. Tim tried calling the quad-band phone but could not get through. Eventually an e-mail arrived from Mike explaining that he was not in Australia but in Hong Kong.

He sounded tense and exasperated. The problem was the £100,000 reward, which had once again stirred up anxieties among Mike’s people. “The Darwin end is now off thanks to the 100,000-pound offer, people [should] know the damage they can do making that kind of offer,” he wrote scoldingly. “That has changed a lot of the other people’s plans and things are not as they were before … Please before you say anything to people ask me first because we don’t want things getting hot.”

A few more days passed. Mike called from Hong Kong to say that he was going to meet his “man on the inside” to collect Lucie.

He called again to report that the man had been murdered in his car.

Adam said to Tim, “He’s playing games. He’s really bullshitting us now. He’s making us go round the world; he’s not producing anything. He’s always asking for more money.”

Rather impatiently, Mike agreed to send Tim proof that he really was in Hong Kong, as he insisted. Tim asked what had happened to the promised photograph of Lucie and the lock of her hair. They were waiting for Mike in Holland, Mike said, in a private PO box accessible only to him.

The conversations went back and forth. They went on for weeks. In Tokyo, meanwhile, the Japanese police were slowly tracking down leads. Tim and Sophie alternately came and went. Adam, and the few close friends who knew about Mike Hills, told Tim that he was being conned. At the end of August, he flew back to the Isle of Wight, having failed once again to bring Lucie home. At least once every day he spoke to Mike Hills, who talked of his struggles to reestablish contact with the sex slavers. But he never again sent any money to Mike.

One evening in the middle of September, a month and a half after their first and only encounter, Tim was driving home after a day of meetings. On a whim, he dialed Mike, not on the quad-band roaming telephone but at his home in Holland. A woman answered. Tim put on an impersonation of a Japanese speaking English.

“Haroo,” he said. “Can I speak with Mistar Hirruz?”

“I’m awfully sorry,” said Mrs. Hills. “He’s just popped out.”

“He no Hong Kong?”

“No, no, he’s here in Holland. He’s just gone down the shop. He’ll be back in a mo.”

Tim hung up. A few moments later, Mike called.

“I just had my wife on the phone from Holland,” he said. “She just got a strange call from someone. Sounded Japanese. You don’t … D’you know who that was?”

“No idea, Mike, no idea,” said Tim. “Where are you, by the way? Are you still in Hong Kong?”

“Tim,” said Mike, in tones of exasperation, “I told you before, I’m telling you again:
I’m in Hong Kong
.”

Tim had bought a digital tape recorder in Narita Airport and after this exchange he began recording these conversations. But it became harder and harder to get through to Mike Hills. Eventually, he stopped calling altogether.

*   *   *

Mike was a con man, of course. His story was all lies.

In October 2000, Tim got a call from another stranger. His name was Brian Winder, and he was the father of a twenty-four-year-old investment banker named Paul. In March, Paul Winder had been trekking across the jungles of Colombia with a botanist friend. They were hunting for rare orchids, but one week they disappeared in the area close to the border with Panama known as the Darién Gap. Nothing more had been heard from them. It was assumed that they had been kidnapped by one of the various groups of bandits, revolutionaries, and drug smugglers that operate in the lawless area. His parents were beginning to resign themselves to Paul’s death, when they got an intriguing call at their family home in Essex. The man at the other end of the line spoke plausibly of “underworld contacts” in Panama who knew the whereabouts of their son. Brian paid £5,000 to the man, who had bad teeth and a Cockney accent, but nothing had ever come of it, and no one had any idea where Paul Winder was.

Mike Hills hadn’t even bothered to use a different name.

The Winders had been to the Essex police and now Tim went to see them too. He made a long statement setting out the whole story and handed over his tape recordings and the collected fax and e-mail correspondence from Hills. Charges were filed and an arrest warrant issued, but Mike’s whereabouts were unclear. He seemed to have left Holland for Alicante in Spain. There was talk of extraditing him, but after a few months, Tim heard nothing more.

To the joy of his family, Paul Winder and his friend were released by their guerrilla captors after nine months of captivity and arrived back in Britain in time for Christmas 2000.

Tim had almost forgotten about the whole affair when he got a phone call from one of the Essex detectives two years later. A pair of traffic policemen in central London had been questioning an illegally parked motorist and asked to see his driver’s licence. When they ran the details through the computer, they discovered that Michael Joseph Hills had an outstanding arrest warrant against his name.

Mike went on trial at Chelmsford Crown Court in April 2003, charged with two counts of obtaining property by deception. His address was given as a bed-and-breakfast in Waterloo. He pleaded guilty and said that he had needed to pay for treatment for his wife, who was dying of cancer. But the judge said that there was no evidence that this was how the money had been spent. Mike Hills’s criminal record listed convictions for deception and theft dating back to the 1970s. He was sent to prison for three and a half years.

Before sentencing, Mike said, “At the end of the day, it was me that took the money, no one else. I’d like to be in a position to pay these people back. It would be nice.”

Journalists called Tim about the verdict and quoted him saying the kind of things that people are expected to say in such circumstances: terrible, evil, despicable, abominable, preying on misfortune. All of this was true. “But even at the time,” Tim told me later, “I was aware that without this candle flicker of hope I would have been in a terrible state. This single thing, this safety line that I was holding on to, was actually keeping me buoyant. All the time, there was a faint possibility that this man might bring Lucie back. It kept my head above water.”

Tim understood that there was more to it than a simple story of an evil con man and an innocent victim. He had needed Mike Hills, and, in some sense, out of grief and need, he had created him. Mike was Tim’s version of the psychics to whom Jane was so susceptible. One promised deliverance based on supernatural insights; the other offered cruder and more palpable tools—bags of cash, guns, beatings.

“When I realized it was all lies, that was my concern,” Tim said, “that this lifeline had been wrenched out of my hands. I wasn’t concerned about the money, or whether I’d been conned. I felt no hurt about having been targeted or being the victim of a crime. Those things weren’t of any interest or importance to me at all. The only soreness I had was the soreness of my hand, where this safety line had been wrenched out of it.”

This was what I admired in Tim, and what was also so off-putting about him: even in confusion and grief, he had the capacity to step back and scrutinize his own situation in all its psychological complexity. How many men in his situation—humiliated, as many people would see it, by a con man—would have the courage and clear-sightedness to say, “It was money well spent”?

“I didn’t feel angry,” Tim said. “I just felt as if I was falling into an abyss—no lifeline and no hope. Where were we going to find it now, the next bit of hope?”

10. S & M

Whatever the answer, it had to lie in Roppongi.

Another family in similar circumstances would have shunned the area, repelled by the place where their sister and daughter had come to harm. But the Blackmans spent many nights there—because it seemed to be the maze where Lucie had lost her way, and also because it had worked its fascination upon them.

August was the height of the Japanese summer. Even in the center of Tokyo, invisible cicadas whined and sneered in the trees. The air conditioners pumped out hot air, making the streets more oppressive than ever, and the neon of the lights diffused to a glow in the soft wet air. After dinner in Bellini’s on Huw Shakeshaft’s tab, Tim and Sophie and their helpers would disperse among the bars and clubs, looking for traces of Lucie.

Tim visited Club Cadeau and One Eyed Jack’s, and one of the clubs where girls danced around a pole and stripped to their bikini bottoms. One night he dropped in at Casablanca, where Lucie had worked. “The whole thing was weird,” he said. “This cramped little room, with these fairly mediocre Western girls and very animated Japanese guys pretending to be able to speak English. It was sleazy and grim. But I didn’t relate Lucie to it, because I knew that she never related to it herself. If she’d been saying, ‘It’s really fantastic, I love it!’ I’d’ve thought, ‘What’s the girl on?’ But she never liked it, and in a strange way that was comforting.”